In my previous article in this series, I showed you how to deploy the Service Provider Foundation and I also discussed some of the other prerequisites that must be put into place prior to configuring Azure Pack. Now that the necessary components are all in place we can move forward with the configuration. As you may recall, Azure Pack is functional, but it doesn’t really do anything yet because it isn’t tied into our environment. That’s what I want to show you how to do in this article.

To get started, go ahead and log into the Azure Pack administrative portal. If you are presented with the Azure Pack tour then just click the Next icon several times until the tour comes to an end and you will be taken to the main Service Management Portal screen, which you can see in Figure A.

Figure A: You will need to go into the Service Management Portal.

If you look at the list of containers on the left side of the screen above, you will notice one labeled VM Clouds. Go ahead and click on the VM Clouds container. Upon doing so, you will be taken to the screen shown in Figure B.

Figure B: Click on the VM Clouds container.

As you look at the figure above, you will notice that there is an option to register System Center Service Provider Foundation. The actual link is labeled First You Must Register Your Service Provider Foundation. Go ahead and click on this link. When you do, Azure Pack will display the Register System Center Service Provider Foundation dialog box, shown in Figure C.

Figure C: You must register System Center Service Provider Foundation.

As you can see in the figure, you are going to need to enter a service URL, a user name, and a password. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you exactly what to enter because the required information is going to be different in every organization. I can however, give you some hints.

The service URL is usually going to be HTTPS:// followed by the fully qualified domain name of your System Center Service Provider Foundation Server. The port number is usually going to be 8090, so you will have to append :8090/ to the end of the URL. In my case for instance, the URL is HTTPS://pc-spf.mgmt.com:8090/.

The user name is going to be the service account that you set up to allow the Service Provider Foundation to access SQL Server. In my case, the user name is mgmt.\spf-sql-sa. The password is of course the password for that account. You can see the populated dialog box in Figure D.

Figure D: You must enter a service URL, a user name, and a password.

Click on the Done icon and the registration process will begin. The registration process usually takes a minute or two to complete and you will see some animation at the bottom of the screen indicating that the registration is progressing. When the animation stops, it is important to confirm that the registration was successful.

If you look at the lower right corner of the Azure Pack interface, you should see a number 1 with three horizontal green bars to the right of it. This number 1 is Azure Pack’s way of telling you that there is one notification for you to view. When you click on this icon, you should see a message telling you that System Center Service Provider Foundation has been registered. You can click Ok to clear the message. Figure E shows the icon with the number one and the three horizontal green bars, as well as the confirmation message indicating that registration was successful.

Figure E: You must verify that System Center Service Provider Foundation has been successfully registered.

Now that the registration process has been completed, the next thing that we will have to do is to link Azure Pack to System Center Virtual Machine Manager. This is relatively easy to do, but it is worth noting that the instructions that I will be providing are based on the assumption that you have configured System Center Virtual Machine Manager as a private (or hybrid) cloud provider. To the best of my knowledge, you cannot link Azure Pack to System Center Virtual Machine Manager unless you have first used Virtual Machine Manager to define one or more clouds.

So with that said, click on the VM Clouds container, shown in Figure B. Now, make sure that the Clouds tab is selected and then click on the link labeled Use an Existing Virtual Machine Cloud Provider to Provision Virtual Machines. You can see what this looks like in Figure F.

You will now be prompted to enter the fully qualified domain name for your System Center Virtual Machine Manager server, the port number that you want to use, and the fully qualified domain name for the remote desktop gateway. The port number and the remote desktop gateway name are optional, but you do have to enter the name of the Virtual Machine Manager server. When I set up Azure Pack in my own lab, I did not have to enter a port number or a remote desktop gateway name. You can see what this looks like in Figure G.

Click Register and your System Center Virtual Machine Manager server will be registered with Azure Pack. The registration process works exactly like what you saw when we registered the Service Provider Foundation. There is an animation that indicates that the registration process is active. When this process completes, you will once again see a notification icon with the number one and three horizontal green bars. You can click on this icon to see confirmation that the registration process was successful, as shown in Figure H. However, it is usually obvious that the registration was successful.

If you look at the figure above, you will notice that my Virtual Machine Manager server has been added to the list of VM clouds. You can also see that the server’s status is listed as ready and that we can see the number of virtual machines that currently exist.

One thing that I want to point out about the figure above is that there are columns for virtual machines, cores, memory, and storage. The numbers that you see in these columns reflect the resources that have already been allocated on the virtual machine manager server.

Conclusion

Now that we have linked our Virtual Machine Manager server to Azure Pack we can begin to use Azure Pack. In the next article, I am going to explain how to set up a hosting plan. Eventually, I also want to explain how to link Azure Pack to a public cloud.

If you would like to read the other parts in this article series please go to:

Featured Links

Read Next

Author

Brien Posey

Brien Posey is a freelance technology author and speaker with over two decades of IT experience. Prior to going freelance, Brien was a CIO for a national chain of hospitals and healthcare facilities. He has also served as a network engineer for the United States Department of Defense at Fort Knox. In addition, Brien has worked as a network administrator for some of the largest insurance companies in America. To date, Brien has received Microsoft’s MVP award numerous times in categories including Windows Server, IIS, Exchange Server, and File Systems / Storage. You can visit Brien’s Website at: www.brienposey.com.

Latest Podcast

Recommended

Follow Us

Getting Started With Azure Pack (Part 5)

TECHGENIX

TechGenix reaches millions of IT Professionals every month, and has set the standard for providing free technical content through its growing family of websites, empowering them with the answers and tools that are needed to set up, configure, maintain and enhance their networks.